To have good mental health and a flourishing life, men need good fathers and strong male role models. They also need to have a sense of a cosmic destiny or the recognition that they have a purpose in the world.
That’s the idea behind the great book Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men by psychologist James Hollis. He explores how deeply a father’s absence or abuse can wound a man. “Each man carries a longing for his father and his tribal fathers,” Hollis writes. “Father gives light, life, energy — no wonder he has historically been associated with the sun — but father can also blast, wither, crush.”
When a father is absent, it leaves a soul-deep longing in a man, Hollis continues. “When the parental images in the child are inadequately modeled by the parents, he carries the deficit throughout his life. He longs for something missing, even as he might carry a vitamin deficiency and crave a certain food. … He may be full of rage for the failure of his father to father, or for the absence of cultural fathers, or he may carry a secret grief for his lost father.”
This grief helps explain the problem of male suicide. The suicide rate is 27.3 per 100,000 among men ages 45 to 64. It is 28.3 per 100,000 for men ages 45-64. There was a dip in suicide rates in 2019 and into 2020, but a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shows that 2021 reversed that trend. Suicide rates are back to near-record levels, with 14 out of every 100,000 people, both men and women, taking their own lives.
THE CULTURAL IGNORANCE OF THE WAR ON GENDERED LANGUAGE
The noticeable absence of strong men in society also helps explain the cultural longing for them. Novelist Ander Monson, for example, admitted in his new memoir that he’d watched the movie Predator 146 times. In Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, Monson explores the 1987 cornball sci-fi movie, sometimes literally frame by frame, and extracts lessons from it about masculinity. While Predator is a celebration of testosterone, guns, and explosions, Monson also views it as a critique of toxic masculinity. One review of the book pointed out that when conventional weapons failed against the monster, star Arnold Schwarzenegger had to camouflage himself in mud to get the upper hand — that he had to “feminize” himself and “put on makeup.”
What is passed over in his memoir is Monson’s broken relationship with his father. His mother died when he was 7 years old, and his father remarried. “My dad and my stepmother did not get along very well,” he writes. “Especially when he drank and she got mean.” Elsewhere, he says, “My father turned his energies and all his angers to drinking.” Monson wound up getting into a lot of trouble, including episodes that involved the Secret Service.
So behind all the pop culture analysis and academic theorizing is something very basic: Ander Monson was grieving for an absent and drunk father. He found his “cultural fathers” in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, and the rest of the testosterone squad in Predator. I mean, the guy watched the movie 146 times.
What Monson was seeing is what Hollis describes in Under Saturn’s Shadow: a male tribe that would accept him and initiate him into a larger cosmic drama. In premodern cultures, male elders served an important purpose. Rites of initiation provided a formalized ritual to signal that a young man was becoming an adult, but more importantly, they showed that a boy had entered into a larger story. It meant that his life had meaning not just in the community but also because of God (or the gods).
Here’s how psychologist Carl Jung described it: “That gives peace, when people feel they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal. … A career, producing of children, all are maya [illusions] compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.”
This is why I believe the great male action movie of the 1980s was not Predator but The Road Warrior. The 1981 Mel Gibson action film depicts a man, Mad Max, who is a loner but learns to channel his energy to a larger cause, that of saving an entire village from rampaging marauders. The other men in the village become his allies and even friends, with two of them exchanging a smile when the job is done in the end. Gibson is key to initiating a wild young boy into a greater cause — a boy who, it turns out, is the voice-over narrator of the film. Gibson’s “Mad Max” became a leader, a father, and a legendary figure in a larger historical drama.
Men who are not properly initiated and who have no purpose or tribe of fellow brothers to run with can suffer depression, rage, and a lifelong inability to handle relationships.
In Under Saturn’s Shadow, Hollis has it right:
What the modern man suffers from, then, is the wounding without the transformation. … He is asked to be a man when no one can define it except in the most trivial of terms. He is asked to move from boyhood to manhood without any rites of passage, with no wise elders to receive and instruct him, and no positive sense of what such manhood might feel like.CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
